I wasn't sure whether to put this under the Cat or under the Cabal, and I guess the technical aspect makes it as much fair game for here, so...

How much of the Cat's pheeble chat was a response to our Sequence-Breaking tendencies? I mean, I don't think it was solely there to give the Cabal an excuse to start using names that it would be harder for anyone with the desire to brute-force, but was that a part of it? And if so, curiosity demands I ask: what would the names of the remaining pheeble chats we got have been if that hadn't happened, or is that another "we would have decided at the time but since it didn't happen it's not a thing" case? (Or is it another "if you want answers then solve that bonsus puzzle already" case? )

Why are we even arguing about a dead fictional dude and hypothetical ninjas?

The Cat's trolling had always been a part of the storyline, actually. We figured the Cabal was going to need to really buckle down and start recruiting, and because the Cat delivered many of their opening posts to you guys (and because he's the biggest troll in the game), we decided it would make sense for him to be the first visitor to Pheeble. The later chats were weirdly named because it made sense that the Cabal would want to start taking security measures, which was an idea left over from the original plan of "hack into a voice chat of theirs and listen in on their plans".

And you guys really only broke sequence the one time with FictionalThreat.

At the risk of a derail, I'll confirm that you only broke sequence with FictionalThreat. It's not sequence breaking if you skip part of a puzzle that was designed anticipating you might skip that part.

We always expected you to find the other ezblogs, for instance; if you hadn't, we would have built a little puzzle that led to them. No big deal either way. Dryu's recent plaintext crack of the Vigenere cipher is a perfectly legitimate way of solving that problem. I reserve "sequence breaking" for times when the game's continuity is in serious risk of being damaged.

Dana wrote:And you guys really only broke sequence the one time with FictionalThreat.

Tom wrote:At the risk of a derail, I'll confirm that you only broke sequence with FictionalThreat. It's not sequence breaking if you skip part of a puzzle that was designed anticipating you might skip that part.

Connor Fallon wrote:Just in case you don't know, you only really broke sequence with Fictional Threat

So, was there any actual sequence breaking achieved by the players?

But soft! What rock through yonder window breaks? It is a brick! And Juliet is out cold!Man, I'm really glad R&J got refic'd before I added this signature.

Dana wrote:And you guys really only broke sequence the one time with FictionalThreat.

Tom wrote:At the risk of a derail, I'll confirm that you only broke sequence with FictionalThreat. It's not sequence breaking if you skip part of a puzzle that was designed anticipating you might skip that part.

Connor Fallon wrote:Just in case you don't know, you only really broke sequence with Fictional Threat

Tom wrote:We always expected you to find the other ezblogs, for instance; if you hadn't, we would have built a little puzzle that led to them. No big deal either way. Dryu's recent plaintext crack of the Vigenere cipher is a perfectly legitimate way of solving that problem. I reserve "sequence breaking" for times when the game's continuity is in serious risk of being damaged.

The only thing that we didn't actually anticipate is that anyone *would* think to solve the Vigenere that way. I remember, in Perplex City, when Card #243 - Shuffled stumped the player base for 18 months because we had issues trying to solve the Solitaire cipher in the same way. Admittedly, we used a much simpler cipher this time, and I was aware that the reverse engineering of the cipher was a possibility. I just didn't see anyone trying it.

That said, the appropriate trope for that maneuver is Outside The Box Tactic. We gave you all the tools to get to that point in the files provided. You simply used them in a different manner than we first anticipated.

I smiled when the wall was built, for I knew we were creating something incredible. And I smiled when it cracked, for the world would soon see what we had wrought.

They switched to an arbitrary naming scheme after the Cat trolled them to make it more difficult to guess.

You still COULD have brute forced them, assuming they were on the site--which, oftentimes, they weren't. We frequently created chats later than their canonical creation date. This is why it was important to discourage brute forcing. It would have made a lot more work for us a lot earlier.